Advertise on podcast: The Crypto Conversation

Michael Steuer is President and CTO of the Casper Association, the Swiss non-profit behind Casper Network, a proof-of-stake Layer 1 built for regulated real-world assets and payments between AI agents. Born in Amsterdam and based in Los Angeles for more than two decades, Michael has spent around 30 years in technology. That includes a stint as CTO for mobile at THQ, where his team shipped some of the first downloadable mobile games. He then co-founded Casper in 2018, built much of its ecosystem tooling through his company MAKE, and returned to lead the project in 2024. Why you should listen Casper's origin story starts inside Ethereum's own research group, where its proof-of-stake design was first developed. Michael and his co-founders wagered that enterprises would need something Ethereum wasn't going to deliver quickly: a chain that companies with thousands of existing engineers could build on using the languages, testing and deployment processes they already have. Just as important was certainty. Michael explains why the probabilistic finality retail users tolerate, waiting through confirmations before an exchange releases funds, is unacceptable for an institution moving billions. During that window nobody can say who is legally responsible for the money, so Casper was designed so that a transaction belongs to the recipient from the very next block. He applies the same realism to tokenization. Minting a token that claims to represent an asset takes a minute, he says, but making that token confer enforceable rights is the hard part. Through the ERC-3643 standard and the T-REX Network, Casper is working to make compliance data, such as investor eligibility, jurisdictional limits and holding periods, travel with an asset as it moves between chains. The second half of the conversation turns to what Michael sees as the larger opportunity. Cloudflare now reports that bots generate more web traffic than humans, yet almost no website can sell anything to them. Sign-ups, logins, card forms and terms-and-conditions boxes were all built for people. His answer is x402, a dormant payment code from the early HTTP specification that Coinbase and Circle revived as a standard for agents to pay per request. Casper is a founding member of the x402 Foundation, which now sits under the Linux Foundation, and settles those payments in its own dollar stablecoin, csprUSD. Payouts.com recently adopted Casper as the settlement rail for its AI agent products. Michael argues that companies blocking agents are turning away most of their visitors. He also expects stablecoin tribalism to disappear, because an agent shouldn't care which dollar it spends. That emphasis on ease of use is the thread through the final stretch. Michael says crypto's usage remains in the single-digit percentages of the global population after 16 years largely because the industry made it so hard to use, from seed phrases to incompatible wallets, and warns against repeating that mistake with agents and tokenized assets. He makes the case for the CSPR token as a utility asset whose value tracks network usage, citing a staking yield he puts at around 10 to 11 percent alongside native liquid staking, and the recent Kraken listing for US access. In the hot take round he calls himself a multi-chain opportunist and argues that blockchain should never try to be the answer to everything. He predicts a decade defined by the convergence of TradFi and DeFi and by agentic traffic approaching totality. He also notes that most people don't realize they can hold tokenized stock exposure in a wallet and borrow against it, and names Foundation as his sci-fi pick. Supporting links Stabull Finance Casper Network Casper on Twitter Michael on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Ran Hammer is CEO at Orbs, a decentralized Layer-3 blockchain that works behind the scenes for DEXs. It gives smart contracts the automation and execution logic they lack on their own, which powers limit orders, TWAP, liquidity aggregation and perpetual futures across dozens of venues. Ran is an Israeli based in London and a former high-tech M&A lawyer. He has been with Orbs since its 2017 beginnings, working as general counsel, then in business development, then as chief business officer, before taking over as CEO in September. Why you should listen Ran came to crypto the way many lawyers of his generation did. In 2015 a university friend and future Orbs co-founder, Daniel Peled, told him he had raised money for his startup in Bitcoin. Within two years Ran was the rare attorney at a reputable firm who understood the technology, and he spent the 2017 ICO boom advising clients who wanted to do things by the book when no book existed yet. Nine years into Orbs, he explains plainly what the project is: a proof-of-stake network with no TVL or DEXs of its own, which supplies the automation and logic that smart contracts can't perform by themselves. That makes Orbs nearly invisible to the traders who use it. Ran is candid that this is good for users and difficult for a project whose token benefits from retail recognition. He also acknowledges that the market has moved enough that a small pivot is needed for Orbs to stay relevant. His view of the current market is sober. The yield chasing of DeFi summer has mostly gone. Many retail traders left after the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade and did not return. The activity that remains is increasingly professional, ranging from two-person trading teams running bots to BlackRock buying spot assets for its ETFs, which is why Ran prefers the term "on-chain finance." He calls Hyperliquid the most successful dApp to date. He also argues that most DEXs, even ones that dominate their ecosystems, cannot build Hyperliquid-level order book depth. Orbs' answer is Perpetual Hub Ultra 2.0, an intent-based model in which hedgers take the other side of trades and offset them across Binance, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Variational, Aster and other venues. Users get pairs from all of those markets on whatever chain they're on, with a single collateral. QuickSwap has already made it the default perps engine across its chains. Ran says he rarely opens Google or Gmail anymore. He runs most of his online life through a Telegram bot on OpenClaw, with Anthropic and OpenAI models working in loops. That habit led Orbs to repackage its products as an MCP and an agent skill, and to think seriously about how a protocol gets discovered when an AI agent, rather than a person, chooses which tools to use. He says the Orbs swap skill now outranks bigger, better-funded projects on adoption, while noting that actual agentic trading volume is still smaller than the hype suggests. He also covers the recently passed OIP-9 DAO vote, upcoming Season 1 tokenomics built on revenue-funded buybacks and burns, and record staking levels despite a token he openly says is underpriced. In the hot take round, Ran calls himself 80 percent Bitcoin maximalist. He predicts that within ten years banks will provide liquidity and trade through AMMs instead of OTC desks, and says most people still underestimate what today's AI tools can do. Supporting links Stabull Finance Orbs Orbs on Twitter Ran on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Eli Hylands is the founder of Flow Crypto, a New Zealand on and off ramp that launched about a month before this recording. He has been involved in crypto for roughly ten years, and before Flow he worked as a software developer and business analyst at IAG. He built the platform largely by himself over about a year, alongside his day job, after seeing a gap open in the local market. Why you should listen When Swyftx acquired Easy Crypto in 2025 and began moving its New Zealand customers across, the country's best-known retail exchange effectively left the market. Hylands saw the gap. Flow Crypto is his answer: a Kiwi-owned, non-custodial service where customers send New Zealand dollars from their bank account and receive crypto directly in their own wallet, with selling running the other way. It charges a flat 0.79 percent fee, supports up to 50 assets, and is registered on the Financial Service Providers Register. Hylands says the software was the easy part. Securing a bank account took about six months, and the hardest work was compliance: meeting reporting obligations to the Department of Internal Affairs while not asking customers for so much information that signing up becomes a chore. His customers, he says, skew toward altcoins rather than Bitcoin, and span all ages, which surprised him. Supporting links Stabull Finance Flow Crypto Flow Crypto on LinkedIn Flow Crypto on Instagram Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to The Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review.

Nikita Monastyrskiy is chief marketing officer at Keeper, the self-custodial wallet formerly known as Tonkeeper. He started in crypto in 2018, running bounty and Bitcointalk signature campaigns while still at university, then spent four years at a crypto marketing agency, rising from community manager to senior growth strategist. He went on to join the marketing team at Ethereum layer two Mode, helping take it from launch to exchange listings, before moving to Wallet in Telegram in 2025 as head of partner marketing. He later switched from the custodial side to the self-custodial one, joining Tonkeeper to lead its marketing. Why you should listen Tonkeeper built its reputation as the leading wallet on TON, and last month it gave up the name. Monastyrskiy explains why: users had stopped living on a single chain, and were juggling several apps to hold stablecoins on TRON, Bitcoin, Ethereum and assets on layer twos. The "TON" in the name tied the brand to one network, so the team dropped it and kept the rest. Keeper now supports seven networks, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON and Base, and launched mobile-first, because that is where the data showed younger users transacting.  He is direct about the trade-off at the heart of self-custody. Keeper cannot access, freeze or recover user funds, and he argues that the risk people associate with self-custody comes down to how they store their recovery phrase. Keep it offline and secure, and the main danger disappears. The harder part, in his view, is psychological: when an exchange gets hacked, users have someone to blame, but with self-custody the responsibility is entirely theirs. He sees the wallet as stage one of crypto adoption, the place where someone buys their first Bitcoin, and stage two as giving those users access to everything else on-chain, from tokenized stocks and prediction markets to simpler perpetual futures trading, which he says remains too complicated for newcomers. Looking further out, Monastyrskiy describes his ideal wallet as one users barely see: connected to an AI assistant, taking voice commands to swap or trade, with no thought given to gas or withdrawals. He thinks a supervised version, where users still sign each transaction, is about a year away, and full automation further off. He also reports a pickup in on-chain activity since May, with volumes rising again this quarter. In the hot take round, he argues that real adoption will come from everyday payments in emerging markets rather than institutions, and picks Nineteen Eighty-Four as the science fiction he fears could become reality. Supporting links Stabull Finance Keeper Keeper on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

Chad Barraford is a co-founder and the technical lead of THORChain, the cross-chain decentralized exchange that lets users swap native assets — real Bitcoin for real Ethereum — without wrapping, bridging or trusting an intermediary. He found crypto in 2017 while traveling, having sold everything he owned, and built a blockchain from scratch as an academic exercise on the theory that the best way to understand a thing is to construct it from zero. He met his co-founder at a Cosmos hackathon in Berlin in 2019; the first lines of THORChain were written there, and the token launched a week later. Why you should listen THORChain spent late September in the middle of crypto's loudest argument. After attackers took roughly $387.5 million from Bitget on 24 September, portions of the proceeds were routed through THORChain into Bitcoin, and Bitget CEO Gracy Chen made a public, formal request that the protocol refuse service to the attacker addresses. The answer was no — though Chad's first move in this conversation is to reject the premise of the question. It was not his answer, because he does not own, operate or control THORChain. There is no mechanism in the code base to block a wallet or a transaction, and never has been. Even if the community wanted one, validator consensus takes between three days and two weeks to reach a two-thirds majority, by which point a swap observed an hour ago is long settled. To make blocking practical you would have to install an admin key and redesign the protocol around centralization — at which point, as he puts it, you have rebuilt traditional finance on a different technology stack and he is no longer interested in the problem. The obvious counter is that THORChain's own node operators did pause the network in May, when a flaw in its threshold signature scheme let an attacker drain $10.7 million from one of six vaults and the protocol went dark for 39 days. Chad's distinction is between protecting the protocol and policing its users: validators on any chain have a security obligation to the network they are paid to secure, which is why Bitcoin's own miners forked away the value overflow bug in August 2010 after someone minted 184 billion coins out of nothing. A halt is not a selective freeze. What genuinely puzzles him is the singling out — six or more DEXs handled Bitget-linked flows, Uniswap among the venues in the broader conversation, and nobody asks Bitcoin or Ethereum to reject tainted transactions. On where responsibility actually sits, he is blunt: stolen funds have to exit to dollars eventually, and that exit runs through centralized exchanges, which are the entities that can stop it and have not always chosen to.   Supporting links Stabull Finance THORChain THORChain on X Chad Barraford on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to The Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review.

Cris Blanco is chief strategy officer at Beldex, the privacy-first layer one that began in 2018 as a fork of Monero and now runs a suite of privacy applications for messaging, browsing, networking and payments. He has spent more than 15 years across Web3, frontier technology and digital platforms, working at founding-team and senior-leadership level on go-to-market, ecosystem strategy and partnerships. Most recently he was part of the founding team at Humanity Protocol, where he helped scale testnet adoption to more than three million users in 90 days. Why you should listen Blanco has moved from a project about proving who you are to one about keeping that private, and he argues the two are the same problem. His work on identity convinced him that people want to prove specific facts about themselves without exposing everything else, and that privacy has to be part of a system's architecture from the start. He applies the same logic to crypto itself. Blockchains solved verification without a middleman, he says, but verifying that a transaction is valid does not require publishing everyone's balance, salary and coffee purchases to the world permanently. That view explains why Beldex builds a whole stack rather than a single app. Blanco points out that privacy fails at the weakest layer: an encrypted chat tied to a phone number, a hidden IP address undone by a public payment. So alongside private BDX payments, Beldex offers BChat for messaging without a phone number or email, BelNet as a decentralized VPN, the Beldex Browser, and a naming service for human-readable addresses. Blanco says BChat accounts for roughly two thirds of the ecosystem's 1.5 million installs, which he reads as evidence that messaging, not payments, is the easiest way to bring non-crypto users into privacy tools. On the tension between privacy coins and regulators, he argues that banks and hospitals hold sensitive data without publishing it and still comply with the law. Exchanges and fiat gateways carry the compliance obligations, and users should be able to disclose specific information to specific parties. Beldex has published a MiCA white paper to that end. AI, he argues, makes the case stronger. People already hand AI assistants their documents and private thoughts, and as businesses route payroll and payments through agents the exposure grows. Blanco says Beldex is testing encrypted agent-to-agent communication as a next product. In the hot take round, he describes success in ten years as the point where nobody talks about privacy because it has become as standard as HTTPS, and explains why rereading Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics feels different in the age of AI alignment. Supporting links Stabull Finance Beldex Beldex on X Cris Blanco on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

John Lilic is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance platform for spending, trading and earning across chains. One of crypto's longest-serving builders, he worked at the Bitcoin Center in New York City in 2014 before joining ConsenSys as one of its first employees, spending six years helping to build the Ethereum ecosystem.  Why you should listen Most neobanks ask users to hand over their assets. Tria's pitch is that you can have the one-tap convenience of a fintech app without doing so. Lilic explains how the product routes assets across chains while leaving the user in custody at all times, so money can move from an Earn vault to a card top-up to a trading position on Hyperliquid or Decibel without Tria ever holding it. He argues this is more than a philosophical distinction. Self-custody has let Tria grow in Korea and Japan, markets where offering custodial products has become increasingly difficult, and where supporting many chains matters because communities such as XRP holders are so large. He also makes the case that when users move funds to themselves rather than deposit into a custodian, they keep control over when a taxable disposal occurs. The larger idea, and the one Tria is taking to institutions, is that any company with a large audience can now become a financial company. Composable on-chain infrastructure means a streaming service, a marketplace or a community app can offer its users wallets, cards and tailored rewards without building a bank from scratch. Lilic walks through the music platform Lissen, which is launching on Tria's infrastructure, and a more ambitious use: tracking the real-world spending that follows an artist into a venue. That attribution data, he argues, could let a venue plan for a show, measure its value afterwards, and eventually support credit products that advance artists money against future bookings rather than making them wait months for royalties. In the hot take round, Lilic moves to the subject he is best known for outside Tria: quantum computing. He argues that cryptographically relevant quantum machines could threaten the elliptic curve cryptography that secures the entire industry sooner than most expect, and that the long-term future of money may rest on physics rather than protocols. It leads him to a pointed view on Ethereum's reversal of The DAO hack, which he calls a mistake, and a thesis that quantum-based systems would remove the option of reversing finality altogether.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Tria Tria on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review. It helps other people find the show.

Gracie Lin is Regional CEO for Singapore and Australia and Head of VIP Growth at OKX. She spent the first decade of her career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, covering banking supervision before moving into markets, then held roles at sovereign wealth fund GIC and at Southeast Asian super app Grab, where she led regional strategy and economics. She joined OKX in 2024 to run its Singapore business as it received its Major Payment Institution license from MAS, and has since taken on Australia and a global remit for the exchange's VIP clients. Why you should listen It is unusual to hear a crypto executive defend regulators without reluctance, and Lin does it from experience. Having sat on the other side of the table, she frames regulation as a set of hard trade-offs rather than an obstacle: supervisors want innovation but must also protect consumers, protect the financial system, keep a level playing field, and watch what every other jurisdiction is doing. Her argument is that the consequences of a regulator getting risk wrong are far larger than those facing any single company, which is why she thinks industry has to engage constantly and constructively. It is also the thread running through her hot take, that a regulated future is a source of growth rather than a constraint, because adoption depends on trust. On the ground, she is candid about the commercial cost. Singapore's strict marketing rules make it harder to reach a broad consumer base and slower to bring products to market, but because every licensed player faces the same restrictions, OKX has built accordingly, and she says the business has grown meaningfully since licensing, anchored by accredited and sophisticated investors. Australia, where OKX launched in 2024 with a derivatives license, is now moving through the country's new Digital Assets Framework, and Lin says the exchange is seeking the additional authorizations needed to offer a fuller product range. She also explains the less visible half of her job: harmonizing how OKX defines and serves VIP clients globally, and why sophisticated traders, whatever their size, end up asking for the same things, from collateral management across positions to separating trading risk from custody risk. The wider picture is a shift in what crypto-native users want to hold. Lin says OKX is seeing interest move toward tokenized real-world assets, including equity derivatives and pre-IPO exposure to AI companies, products the exchange now offers in several markets though not yet in Singapore or Australia. She discusses the strategic partnership with Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and what each side brings. For an example of the future already arriving, she points to the OKX Card, which lets Singapore users spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted while the merchant is simply paid in local currency. For New Zealand listeners, she confirms OKX is watching the market closely. And her science fiction pick, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, arrives with a local connection: Taika Waititi's adaptation, shot in Wānaka and Auckland, is due in cinemas next month. Supporting links Stabull Finance OKX OKX Singapore OKX Australia OKX on X Gracie Lin on LinkedIn Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin

Jake Sylvestre is the founder of Hypercall, an on-chain options exchange built on Hyperliquid. He co-founded his first company, the cybersecurity awareness firm PhishTrain, while still in high school, and moved into crypto through incident response work on ransomware attacks. He went on to contribute to btcd, build a Lightning Network yield product, and lead engineering at Synapse, the cross-chain bridge that has processed more than $55bn in volume across 2.5m users. Hypercall is the same team's pivot from moving assets between chains to writing derivatives on top of them. Why you should listen Options are the most-traded retail derivative in the world, and on-chain they remain a rounding error. Sylvestre's explanation for the gap is structural rather than cultural: anyone short an option needs somewhere deep and liquid to delta-hedge, which historically meant building a successful perpetual futures venue before you could launch an options venue at all. Hyperliquid removed that first step. Perp depth Sylvestre describes as at parity with Binance is now available to anyone building on top of it, which is why Hypercall exists where a dozen earlier attempts stalled. He is candid that other barriers remain, by his estimate there are ten to a hundred times more market makers quoting perps than options, and the instruments are harder to price, but the hedging venue was the binding constraint. The part of the conversation most likely to change how you think about capital efficiency is portfolio margin. Under standard margining, Sylvestre says, an exchange will charge ten to fifteen percent of an option's notional value, which means collecting a few cents of premium on a zero-day contract can require thousands of dollars of collateral. Hypercall instead runs span margining across a trader's whole book for a given asset: an xStocks NVIDIA token already in the account counts as collateral, as does a hedging perp position held on Hyperliquid. The risk engine applies more than twenty historically calibrated shocks, Bitcoin down twenty-five percent in a day with volatility collapsing seventy percent, for instance, to determine what has to be posted. Asked what happens in a repeat of last October's cascade, Sylvestre argues that event sits inside those parameters, and makes the sharper point that options exchanges do not auto-deleverage profitable traders the way perp venues did on the day. Beyond the mechanics, the argument is about who options are actually for. Sylvestre is dismissive of the assumption that retail cannot handle them, citing Robinhood and the American chefs and Uber drivers he knows who trade options daily and understand them well. Retail, not market makers, is Hypercall's stated focus, though he makes the case that a two-sided market needs both: holders of large positions seeking yield through covered calls on one side, directional and volatility views on the other. The longer-term prize is breadth, permissionless options on tokenized equities and any other asset with reliable price discovery, rather than the two to five names a major crypto options venue typically lists.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Hypercall Hypercall app Hypercall on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin Enjoyed the episode? Please give us a five-star review, it helps other people find the show.

Kenneth Shek is the CEO of Moca Network, the identity ecosystem built by Animoca Brands. Over fifteen years he has founded and operated startups across solar energy, social networking in Los Angeles, cross-border e-commerce between China and the rest of the world, and enterprise AI. He joined Animoca around five years ago and has led Moca Network from its first day. Why you should listen Moca Network starts from a claim that sounds provocative until you sit with it: the most valuable digital asset in the world is your personal data, and you do not own any of it. Meta, Google and Apple do. Shek's argument is that this is not merely unfair but structurally limiting, if you cannot prove who you are to a party of your choosing, you cannot capture the value of being that person. Moca's answer is AIR, an account, identity and reputation layer that Animoca sells to enterprises B2B2C, white-labeled into their own apps with a small "powered by AIR" mark at the bottom. Shek says Animoca's portfolio now exceeds 600 companies, which gives Moca an unusual cold-start advantage: an ecosystem to seed before selling outward to telecoms, entertainment groups and ticketing platforms with user bases in the tens and hundreds of millions. He describes the resulting structure as hub-and-spoke, where each spoke that plugs in to verify and acquire users eventually becomes a hub of its own. The sharpest part of the conversation is about what breaks when agents start transacting. Agentic commerce is arriving fast, but Shek argues the identity layer is not keeping pace, and the gap shows up in ordinary situations. When you log into Cathay Pacific or Marriott Bonvoy yourself, the airline and the hotel know your loyalty tier and price accordingly. Delegate that same booking to an agent reading your calendar and the merchant sees only bot traffic, no status, no history, no preferential rate. Ask an agent to open a bank account or apply for a card and it fails outright, because the agent carries no KYC data and the bank has no way to verify it if it did. Moca's proposal is delegated verification: you prove your identity once, then grant your agent time-bound authority to prove things on your behalf, with the merchant side able to check that the proof is real. Shek says the company is working with Visa, Mastercard and regional point-of-sale operators, and building toward both the casual consumer form factor and the regulated one required by eIDAS 2.0, Europe's digital identity regulation, which obliges member states to offer citizens a digital identity wallet by late 2026. Underneath all of this sits a trade-off Shek. Data sharing is what makes ecosystems grow, the reason open data initiatives exist at all, and privacy is the constraint on it, not a virtue that can simply be maximized. Push privacy to its limit and you have shut down the sharing that creates value; push sharing to its limit and you have built the walled garden again with extra steps. His resolution is control rather than concealment: users decide what to share, with whom, and retain the ability to revoke it, which is also the mechanism that keeps a delegated agent from spraying your personal information across the internet. He also makes the case that first-party issuance is already happening — a hotel issuing a stay record back to the guest, who then presents it at a retail outlet or a beach club to unlock an offer — and that this matters more now that cookie consent has gone opt-in, with something like 70 percent of cross-site traffic arriving anonymous by his estimate. The episode closes on AI more broadly, where Shek lands firmly on the excited side: he expects the vertical knowledge premium to collapse and problem framing, reasoning and first-principles thinking to become the scarce skills, and says the platform of agents he built to run his own company has multiplied his output as a CEO several times over. Supporting links Stabull Finance Moca Network Moca Network on X Kenneth Shek on X Andy on X Brave New Coin on X Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to The Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review.

Jason Hitchcock is CEO of Greenlane Holdings (Nasdaq: GNLN), the only US-listed vehicle purpose-built to hold BERA, the native token of the Berachain network, and to put that treasury to work inside the chain's Proof of Liquidity economy. Before taking the job in February he spent fifteen years on the business side of technology startups — a venture studio that sold an app to Amazon, a stint at Twitch, then a liquid token fund launched off the back of a DeFi Summer obsession — and most recently ran business development at thirdweb, where he built out chain infrastructure partnerships across more than 150 networks. Why you should listen Greenlane's origin story was as a cannabis accessories distributor that rode the boom and the bust of that industry before the Berachain Foundation went looking for a public-market proxy for a token with no ETF and no ETP. A $110.7 million private placement led by Polychain Capital — half cash and stablecoins, half BERA — brought in a new board, new management and eventually Jason himself. The legacy business survives as an asset-light drop-shipping operation that helps cover overhead. Everything else points at one asset. Greenlane held roughly 77.7 million BERA at the end of the first quarter, close to a third of circulating supply, and grew BERA-per-share about 44 percent over three months while booking an $18.4 million net loss on fair-value markdowns. That combination — accumulating fast while the mark-to-market bleeds — is the whole digital asset treasury trade in miniature. The argument underneath is more interesting than the balance sheet. Jason's view is that "chain revenue" as the industry reports it is largely a fiction: what those league tables measure is gas burned, money that is destroyed rather than routed to anyone. Berachain inverts the model. Rather than paying the security budget entirely to validators, a large share of emissions is directed to the businesses building on the chain, which use it for customer acquisition and financing, and which bid for those emissions in a validator marketplace — fifty or seventy cents on the dollar for incentives that will grow their protocol. That bid is the revenue, and it flows back to token holders with a claim on it. Protocols like Kodiak, the dominant DEX on the network, and lending market Dolomite are the practical expression of it. Greenlane doesn't just hold the asset; it runs validators, stakes into Proof of Liquidity, and lends its stablecoins into DeFi and onto stable pairs to earn trading fees. Jason frames the company as a signal to the market that there is a buyer in size, permanently. He is candid that this is a rough season to be doing any of it. Equities and precious metals have run while crypto has languished, and he catalogues the disconnect with a certain incredulity: DTCC tokenizing assets, Nasdaq experimenting with blockchain settlement, Stripe with its own chain, Druckenmiller predicting all money becomes stablecoins, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton shipping tokenized funds. Headlines that would have detonated the 2021 market barely register now. His read on what breaks the drought is not a narrative but an invisibility: crypto disappearing into the back end of ordinary products, users earning yield or settling in stablecoins without ever knowing it, and several more zeros of participants arriving without wallets. The CLARITY Act sits in the background as the regulatory unlock, still stalled in the Senate. In the hot take round he lands firmly as a multi-chain opportunist, argues that blockchains are a generic public database technology that will proliferate along distribution lines, and picks Curve Finance as his example of the future already being here — narrow, well-defined DAO governance operating at genuine scale, which he thinks is the model everyone else got wrong.  Supporting links Stabull Finance Greenlane Holdings Greenlane on Twitter Jason on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin

Andrey Didovskiy is the CEO of Seasons, a Solana DeFi protocol built around a Yield 3.0 mechanism which pays holders real assets, gold, Bitcoin and dollars, funded by trading activity. A near-decade crypto veteran who broke into the industry writing white papers before running Atleta Network and co-founding the consultancy SYSDK, Andrey brings an operator's eye to a key problem in decentralized finance: yield that vanishes when prices turn. Why you should listen Most DeFi headline rates are a bull-market illusion. A "100% APY" advertised on a token that then falls eighty percent is worth almost nothing, because the yield was tied to price all along. Seasons flips that dependency. As Andrey explains, the protocol harvests a ten percent Transactional Transfer Tax on every $SEAS trade and converts it into a basket of hard assets paid directly to holders — no staking, no lock-ups, nothing to claim. Hold enough $SEAS in a self-custody wallet and you become a "node," and gold, Bitcoin and dollars simply arrive twice a week. Because the engine runs on volume and velocity rather than sentiment, it keeps working whether the market is climbing or bleeding — a design Andrey frames as turning your wallet into something closer to a savings account. Crypto has always moved in seasons, and so does Seasons the protocol, packaging its evolution into discrete chapters. Season one paid out in memecoins, and Andrey is candid that the community verdict was swift: the people who actually want yield do not want meme yield. Season two corrected course to what the team calls "perfect order" — a basket of Tether Gold, Wormhole-wrapped Bitcoin and Jupiter Lend USDC — assets a saver might happily hold for years. Under the hood, the roadmap layers three compounding engines: the live TTT, a Stakeholder Stablecoin Yield Module that puts queued distributions to work in transit, and Yield Asset Vaults, the first of which is slated to deploy on Kamino. Recent distributions have hovered around ten percent, with the team steering toward a sustainable double-digit band rather than the fleeting ninety-percent spikes that briefly followed launch. Solana is the foundation by conviction, not accident — Andrey sees it as one of a handful of settlement layers where the coming agentic economy will actually live, though he's careful not to write off Ethereum's next act. The bigger bet is that the winning move is to hide the blockchain entirely: strip out the jargon, and let a "put your idle assets to work" button sit quietly inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account. That thesis runs all the way to machines, with Seasons' first AI agent, Gaia, now public and a ten-year vision of a million autonomous "agent loans" and on-chain credit that finally functions. In the hot-take round he lands as a mild Bitcoin-leaning multichain pragmatist, argues that blockchain becomes the priceless trust-and-security layer beneath AI, flags longevity as the most unevenly distributed piece of the future. His closing pitch is the one that sticks: treat a node as infinite dollar-cost averaging, spend only the yield, and you keep stacking Bitcoin for as long as you hold. Supporting links Stabull Finance Seasons Seasons on X Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Tom Gadsden is Vice President of Product at Shufti, the London-based identity-verification and fraud-prevention platform built to let businesses onboard and screen users across borders in seconds rather than days. Gadsden has spent more than a decade building identity and financial-crime products, with earlier roles at credit bureau Experian and in card payments, giving him a close view of how fraud has scaled from a cottage problem into an industry. Why you should listen Shufti sits at an awkward and revealing intersection of the crypto economy. Bitcoin was designed to strip out gatekeepers; Shufti, and the compliance layer it represents, exists to put a version of them back. Gadsden doesn't pretend that tension away. He accepts that know-your-customer checks are anathema to part of the crypto community, and that self-hosted wallets will always let people move funds outside the system. But where crypto collides with fiat on- and off-ramps, governments have decided they want to see where money comes from and where it goes, and firms like Shufti, alongside chain-analytics players such as Chainalysis and Elliptic, are how businesses meet that expectation. He reaches for a useful historical parallel: the card-payments crackdown that arrived with Europe's PSD2 rules, when regulators decided the fraud losses banks had quietly tolerated were grey money the wider economy shouldn't have to absorb. Stablecoin growth, he argues, makes that scrutiny more likely, not less. The most gripping stretch of the conversation is on deepfakes, where Gadsden describes an arms race that has already run through several generations. Shufti is on the third iteration of its detection models, having moved past early metadata tells to techniques that examine how synthetic images blend, how their frequency signatures break down, and what shows up outside the visible spectrum where the generators stop trying. What has really changed, he says, is economics: AI dragged the cost of a convincing fake from tens of dollars to cents, turning fraud into something closer to a production line, with the same operator filing attempt after attempt from bed. The surge is real, with Shufti warning of a many-fold jump in deepfaked-document attacks year over year. The counterintuitive twist is that as detection has caught up, the pendulum has swung back toward human beings: real faces recruited down the pub, and money mules who sail through the initial check and only later start moving other people's money. Catching those cases, Gadsden explains, means watching for behavioral tells, funds fanning in and straight back out, high velocity and low retention, the classic setup where someone keeps fifty pounds for passing thousands through their account. Gadsden is also sharp on where the regulatory map is heading. He reads Tether's retreat from Europe, its USDT effectively pulled from regulated EU exchanges under MiCA, and Binance's withdrawn licensing bid in Greece, as a live test of whether hard rules end up pushing offshore the very firms regulators most want to supervise. On the perennial privacy question he's bracingly unsentimental: anyone uneasy about sharing their face should be far more wary of handing over an iris, a pointed nod to Sam Altman's World project, and even the privacy-forward EU Digital Identity Wallet will still ask for your name, date of birth and a biometric. His honest expectation is that a genuinely high-privacy identity system isn't coming for a decade or two. He closes on a contrarian note for his own industry: the physical passport and plastic driver's license that products like Shufti are built to read will, he suspects, erode faster than most insiders think as digital IDs become the default. It's a clear-eyed, occasionally unsettling tour of the machinery now standing between you and the fraudsters. Supporting links Stabull Finance Shufti Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Margie Feng is marketing lead at Solayer, the Solana-compatible layer-one and the team behind Margin Trade, a non-custodial perpetuals platform that lets traders hold crypto, commodities and equities in a single cross-margin account. Feng came to Web3 from Bitmain, the world's largest crypto-mining hardware maker, and before that ran PR and marketing in the automotive industry for luxury marques including BMW and Genesis, an unusual path that informs her core pitch: she markets as the non-technical user she is, translating complicated machinery into something an ordinary trader actually wants. Why you should listen Solayer began life as a Solana restaking protocol before building out InfiniSVM, a hardware-accelerated chain that already clocks around 330,000 transactions per second on the way to a million-plus, alongside Solayer Pay, a card that lets users spend stablecoins anywhere. Its new flagship is Margin Trade, which reached mainnet in June. Feng's framing of the product is refreshingly concrete. Rather than scatter your collateral across five different positions, one pool backs everything, so a trader can express a view on rates, a chip stock, gold and a token from the same account, with funding, margin and liquidations all settling onchain. The platform was built by contributors from Solayer Labs alongside former traders out of Citadel and Kraken, and that market-structure DNA shows up in details like its auto-deleveraging design, which she argues spreads the pain across many positions instead of bluntly punishing whoever happens to be winning. The conversation's sharpest thread is Feng's view of what "bringing TradFi onchain" should actually mean. The lazy version, she says, is to copy whatever Wall Street is listing. The point instead is to hand anyone the same toolkit without the gatekeeping, collapsing what historically required three separate accounts into one venue. Her clearest proof of concept is Pearl Research (PRL), the GPU-mined token tied to the AI-compute narrative that no other venue, Hyperliquid included, had listed. Margin Trade became the first platform to offer a liquid, leveraged perp on it. The marketing logic follows the same instinct: instead of announcing a listing like everyone else, tell a PRL miner they are already long the token whether they like it or not, then show them how to stop being forced long. The pitch starts from the pain, not the product, and she is candid that in a saturated perps market the only winning move is to play a different game entirely. She situates all of this in a wider migration of equities and real-world assets onchain, and in the demand that platforms like Hyperliquid have proven exists for trading everything in one place. On the mood in Solana's community she is measured rather than hyped, describing a builder base that keeps shipping through the bear market, with payments an especially active corner. The hot-take round lands her as a Bitcoin-leaning holder who keeps most of her stack in cold storage, convinced crypto will reshape the financial system, and genuinely unsure what ten years holds beyond a strong hunch that everyone ends up with a personal AI agent managing their portfolio. Fittingly for someone who thinks the future is already arriving faster than anyone can narrate it, she signs off on Black Mirror and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem as the fiction that keeps feeling less like fiction. Supporting links Stabull Finance Margin Trade Margin Trade on Twitter Solayer on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

Ilies Larbi is the founder and CEO of Ouinex, a multi-asset trading platform built to fuse crypto and traditional markets in a single account while shielding retail traders from the structural disadvantages of conventional order books. A nearly fifteen-year veteran of New York-based forex broker FXCM, where he climbed from sales associate to Managing Director for Europe and a seat on the executive committee, the Paris-based Larbi stepped into crypto in 2022 — late by bull-run standards, as he admits, but with a clear view of the gap he wanted to fill. Why you should listen Larbi's central argument lands with a memorable image: most crypto exchanges drop retail traders into a tank full of sharks. His culprit is the central limit order book, which works beautifully in regulated venues like the NYSE where institutions compete against each other, but breaks down in crypto, where a trader tapping orders from their phone over café Wi-Fi sits on the same book as a high-frequency desk running millions in low-latency infrastructure around the clock. That asymmetry, he argues, is why retail traders so often see stop losses picked off and price action that feels suspiciously erratic. Ouinex's answer is a no-CLOB execution model: institutions are still welcome to provide liquidity, but they're allowed only to make markets, never to take them, and they get zero visibility into where retail orders are resting since those sit on Ouinex's own servers. The result is a kind of Chinese wall, with liquidity providers forced to compete purely on the best bid and ask while an aggregator passes only the sharpest prices through to traders. Ouinex lets users trade spot crypto and perpetuals alongside forex, gold, indices and equities, using their crypto as collateral rather than cashing out to fiat — and crucially, it routes the TradFi side through hundred-year-old market infrastructure rather than rebuilding it as a thin perpetual. Larbi makes the case with hard numbers, contrasting a euro-dollar or gold trade on Ouinex against the same instrument as a perp on a venue like Hyperliquid, where he claims spreads run several times wider, commissions stack on top, and the order book is far shallower. He also points to early evidence that the multi-asset thesis is working: as geopolitics roiled markets, his traders moved record volume into oil and gold while waiting for crypto to get interesting again, exactly the cross-market hedge the platform was designed to enable. Larbi raised nine million dollars entirely from his own trading community — much of it the French-speaking InteractivTrading community — with no venture capital on the cap table, which he argues leaves the platform answerable to its users rather than to investors holding a bag of future tokens. That native token, OUIX, is heading to an ICO via the company's launchpad, pitched as a low-sell-pressure utility play with fee discounts and trading cashback. He's candid that the product is still maturing, urging listeners to test it on a demo account with virtual funds and lean on Ouinex's human (not chatbot) support. The closing hot-take round rounds him out nicely: a self-described multi-chain pragmatist with unshakeable conviction in blockchain's staying power, convinced AI agents will reshape how — and whether — we trade at all, and unashamedly nostalgic for the original Avatar. Supporting links Stabull Finance Ouinex Ouinex on Twitter Andy on Twitter Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.